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What do search volumes reveal about trends in marketing and ecommerce?

At the beginning of 2014, Ashley Friedlein rounded up some trends and predictions for the year in digital marketing and ecommerce.

I thought I’d dip back in and take a look at some of the most incipient trends with some simple Google searches.

Do click through to the searches and see what else you can dig up.

Digital transformation/omnichannel/digitisation

‘Omnichannel’ and ‘digital transformation’ have both seen increased search numbers over 12 months from September 2013.

‘Omnichannel’ is most popular, the word describing the idealised state of every marketing and service channel being interchangeable.

Arguably, ‘omnichannel’, which is a term that seems to get more pickup in the US (some in the UK seeing it as a buzzword) has broader relevance than ‘digitisation’ or ‘digital transformation’ which are phrases specifically relating to an organisational journey.

Omnichannel may have been searched for as a more confusing term, of course.

‘Omnichannel’ had approx. 12,100 monthly searches in July 2014 according to Google AdWords.

Customer experience

Here’s one term that’s most definitely in the ascendancy. As the driver of organisational change, the customer experience is becoming synonymous with the brand.

Advertising is changing rapidly, though it’s only ‘programmatic advertising’ and ‘native advertising’ that have seen searches increase over the 12 months since September 2013.

‘Real time bidding‘ has fallen off slightly and ‘mobile advertising’ is seeing the same volume of searches as it was a year ago.

The incredible spike in ‘native advertising’ searches likely corresponds to Stephen Colbert’s skewering of the topic on his US TV show.

‘Programmatic advertising’ had approx. 2,900 searches in July 2014 according to Google AdWords.

Real time bidding/programmatic advertising

Here’s a close up of that RTB and programmatic comparison to show you how ‘programmatic advertising’ seems to have been popularised.

Content curation/content production/owned media

These terms come from an incredibly popular area of marketing – content marketing. However, there’s not much change to see here.

A slight increase in ‘content curation’ searches and a decrease in searches for ‘owned media’ suggests what some see as the decreasing relevance of the paid/owned/earned model.

‘Owned media’ had approx. 1,600 searches in July 2014 according to Google AdWords.

Service delivery/digital first/mobile first

Three fairly static search terms here when it comes to volume. It’s likely that while we may see more and more digital first and mobile first solutions, these have been talked about in the literature for the last few years and therfore search volumes have not been seen to increase.

‘mobile first’ had approx. 8,100 searches in July 2014 according to Google AdWords.

Recommended

This month, the Social Media sub-report of the compendium saw some particularly interesting stats about engagement (from SocialFlow), how US Fortune 500 companies are using social networks and blogs (Umass) and research which will likely be of interest to businesses and household web-users alike released in August by Fractl.